Used plastic pallets in Maine

What the jobs data shows for Maine

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts private employers in Maine at 3,774 warehousing and storage jobs across 72 establishments in 2025, about 52.4 jobs per establishment.

• Cumberland County: 1,731 warehousing jobs, 46% of Maine and 0.09% of the country, 4.1 times Kennebec County.
• Kennebec County: 419 warehousing jobs, 11% of Maine and 0.02% of the country, 24% of the size of Cumberland County.
• York County: 391 warehousing jobs, 10% of Maine and 0.02% of the country, 23% of the size of Cumberland County.

Maine against the country

Maine's figures sit on the left and the national totals beside them, so each share and rank shows how much of the country's pallet work lands here.

What the ratios say

Disclosure rules in the BLS data hide small counties, so the county totals for Maine are a floor and not the whole of its 3,774 jobs.

• The three largest warehousing counties hold 67% of Maine's jobs in the line, and Cumberland County alone holds 46%.
• The average warehouse in Maine employs 52.4 people where the national average is 81.5, a gap of 36 percent below it.
• Food manufacturing employs 1.50 people for every warehousing job in Maine; across the US the ratio is 0.93.
• Maine holds 0.32% of the nation's food manufacturing jobs and 0.20% of its warehousing jobs, so food is the heavier of the two lines here.
• Pharmaceutical manufacturing adds 2,783 jobs, 0.79% of the US total.
• Refrigerated space works out at 2,120 cubic feet for every warehousing job, against 2,098 nationally.
• Cumberland County's 1,731 warehousing jobs are more than the whole state total of 5 other states, the largest being North Dakota at 1,438.
• Nebraska runs warehouses of nearly the same size, at 52.9 jobs per establishment against 52.4 here.
• For food manufacturing, North Dakota is the closest match at 5,564 jobs, 109 below Maine's 5,673.
• The smallest county the BLS shows for Maine is York County with 391 jobs; the largest has 4.4 times as many.
• If warehousing jobs were split evenly across 50 states, each would hold 2.0% of the total; Maine holds 0.20%, which is 0.10 times an even share.
• Rhode Island sits above Maine with 1,378 more warehousing jobs, and West Virginia sits below with 143 fewer.

Where Maine ranks

Maine and the 39 states above it hold 99% of the country's 1,901,976 warehousing jobs between them. The median state has 23,211, so Maine is 19,436 jobs below it; California, the largest, has 236,923, or 63 times as many.

The pallet-using lines in Maine

By location quotient Maine leans hardest on pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing (1.9x the national share). Pharma shippers want pallets they can sanitise, with papers on resin and colour; some prefer polypropylene because it takes sterilisation.

• Pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing: 2,783 jobs in Maine, 0.79% of the 350,886 across the US, or 0.74 for every warehousing job in the state.
• Food manufacturing: 5,673 jobs in Maine, 0.32% of the 1,775,008 across the US, or 1.50 for every warehousing job in the state.

The ladder around Maine

States are ranked by warehousing and storage jobs. Maine is 40th of 50; the table shows the two states above it and the two below.

Maine has no metro page

Maine has no page for a single metro, since none of the sixty in the data lies inside it. Requests from anywhere in the state are read as they come, and the reply says how a lot would travel.

Training the dock crew

• Show new staff three pallets: one acceptable, one marginal, one rejected.
• Agree on words for faults, such as crack, gouge, bow and dish, and use them.
• Tell people to stop and ask when a pallet carries any mark they do not recognise.
• Remind drivers to enter pockets squarely, since angled entry splits the pocket wall.
• Walk the dock together once a month and compare notes.

Yard storage and weather

• Rain does little harm to plastic, but standing water in the ribs adds weight and breeds odours.
• Freezing weather makes some resins brittle, so avoid dropping or hard-forking cold pallets.
• Hot sun softens decks under load, which is how a stack ends up bowed.
• Wind can topple tall unstrapped stacks, so strap them or keep them short.
• Mud and grit on runners wear floors and conveyors, so brush them off before indoor use.

What to put on a request from Maine

USDA counted 8 million cubic feet of gross refrigerated warehouse space in Maine on 1 October 2025, 34th among the states; ask the maker how a pallet behaves frozen.

• Footprint: 48 x 40 in or a square footprint
• Grade: like new
• Quantity: a band, from a few pallet-loads to a truck
• ZIP: the Maine receiving ZIP

Other states

• Delaware
• Indiana
• Minnesota
• Montana
• Nebraska
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• South Dakota
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wyoming

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